Focusing better when reading is not concentration you summon by trying harder. It is a job you give the book before you open it. Leonardo da Vinci never read passively: every page he read produced questions, errands and margin notes. Read with a pen, write the question first, then close the book and rebuild the argument from memory.
Why the usual advice fails
The standard list is: find a quiet room, silence your phone, use a timer, highlight the important bits. None of that is wrong. None of it fixes the actual failure either.
The failure has a name. In 2004 the psychologists Jonathan Schooler, Erik Reichle and David Halpern published a study called “Zoning out during reading”. They gave people a book, then interrupted them at intervals to ask whether their attention was on the page. It often was not. Worse, the readers frequently had not noticed they had drifted — their eyes kept moving over the words while nothing went in. They called it mindless reading.
A quiet room does not stop this. You can zone out in silence just as easily as on a train. The mind wanders because the task is too passive to hold it, and reading, done the normal way, is almost entirely passive. You are receiving. Nothing is asked of you until the chapter ends, by which point the drift has already happened.
Highlighting feels like the fix, and is not. In 2013 John Dunlosky and colleagues reviewed ten common study techniques for the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Highlighting, underlining, rereading and summarising all scored low utility. Dunlosky said plainly that he was surprised how weak the popular ones were. The techniques that worked were self-testing and spacing the work out. Both make you produce something. Highlighting just makes the page yellow.
What Leonardo da Vinci actually did — named sources, dates
Leonardo left roughly 7,000 pages of notebooks, and historians think that is perhaps half of what he wrote. One volume alone, the Codex Atlanticus in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, runs to 1,119 leaves. The art historian Carlo Pedretti called it the most important of the surviving manuscripts.
The notebooks are not diaries. They are a record of a man interrogating everything he read. Three habits stand out, and each is documented.
He turned reading into errands. In the early 1490s Leonardo wrote a list, preserved in the notebooks and discussed by Toby Lester in Da Vinci’s Ghost (2012), later translated for a wide audience by the journalist Robert Krulwich. It reads like a set of tasks generated by whatever he had been reading: “Get Messer Fazio to show you about proportion.” “Get the Brera friar to show you De Ponderibus.” “Ask Benedetto Portinari by what means they go on ice in Flanders.” “Find a master of hydraulics and get him to tell you how to repair a lock.” Every entry is a question a book raised that he refused to leave unanswered. The popular “to-do list” framing comes from that one modern retelling, so treat the wording as loose, but the page is real and the pattern runs through all the notebooks.
He read with a shopping list of books he did not yet have. In the Madrid Codices, rediscovered in Spain’s national library in 1965 by the scholar Jules Piccus, Leonardo listed about 116 books he wanted access to. An earlier list, around 1495, names roughly 40 he already owned. He tracked his reading the way other people track debts.
He argued in the margins. Leonardo called himself “omo sanza lettere”, a man without letters, meaning he had no Latin schooling. In his late thirties and early forties he taught himself Latin anyway, and the Codex Trivulzianus, dated around 1487 to 1490, is largely long columns of vocabulary he was drilling so he could read the sources directly. When he did read them he pushed back. The notebook aphorisms compiled by Jean Paul Richter in 1883 include his line that anyone who can go to the spring does not drink from the water jar — his standard argument for checking a claim against the world rather than trusting the book.
Why it worked
Every one of those habits forces production. That is the whole mechanism.
Writing the question before you read gives the mind a target, so wandering has something to compete with. Chasing references turns a vague sense of “I should understand this” into a concrete task with a name attached. Arguing in the margin means you have to form a position, which you cannot do while zoned out.
The research points the same way. Dunlosky’s high-utility techniques were the ones that made you retrieve or generate. In 2014 Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer found that students taking notes by hand understood more than students typing, because writing slower forced them to reword the material instead of transcribing it. Mortimer Adler made the same case in How to Read a Book in 1940: marking a book is how you carry on a conversation with its author, and reading well is a matter of asking it questions. Leonardo was doing this four centuries before anyone measured it.
It is also not a new discovery. In 1946 the psychologist Francis Robinson set out a study method he called SQ3R: survey, question, read, recite, review. The two steps people skip are the second and the fourth, question and recite, which are exactly the two that make you produce something. Leonardo’s notebooks are SQ3R with better handwriting and worse follow-through.
None of it depends on willpower. That is the point worth taking. You are not trying to concentrate harder. You are changing the task from receiving to doing, and the focus is a side effect.
How to focus better when reading, step by step
- Read with a pen in your hand and a wide margin. Not a highlighter. A pen you write words with. If your book has no margin, keep a notebook open beside it.
- Before each chapter, write the question you want it to answer. One sentence. If you cannot think of one, read the chapter heading and the first paragraph, then write it. Now the chapter has a job.
- Keep a running “go and find out” list. Every reference, name or claim you cannot resolve, write it down with a source to chase — a person, a book, a search. This is Leonardo’s errand habit, and it stops you sliding past the bits you did not understand.
- After twenty to thirty minutes, shut the book and write four sentences from memory. What did it actually say. This is the self-testing Dunlosky rated highest, and it will feel uncomfortable, because you will discover how little stuck.
- Argue back in the margin. “No.” “Evidence?” “This contradicts page 40.” You do not have to be right. You have to have a position.
- Reread nothing. If a section did not land, it goes on tomorrow’s question list. Rereading is the low-utility technique that feels like work; skip it.
What not to copy
Leonardo wrote right to left in mirror script. This was a left-handed man keeping his hand out of wet ink, not a focus method. Do not encrypt your notes.
The notebooks were also a hoard. Seven thousand pages, barely ordered, almost none published in his lifetime, and the great treatise on painting he kept promising never got finished. Kenneth Clark called him the most relentlessly curious man in history, and that curiosity came bundled with abandoned commissions and patrons left waiting years. The reading habits are worth stealing. The output rate is a warning.
Teaching yourself Latin at forty-two to read primary sources is admirable and probably not your bottleneck. Do not turn “focus better when reading” into a research degree. The margin note and the memory dump are enough.
Frequently asked questions
How do I focus better when reading a book?
Give it a job before you start. Write the one question you want the chapter to answer, read with a pen, and stop every half hour to write down what it said without looking. Focus follows from having a task, not from trying to concentrate.
How can I concentrate better while reading when my mind keeps wandering?
Assume it will wander; that is normal and measured. The fix is a shorter loop between input and output. Read a few pages, then say or write the gist. The wandering has less room when you know a recall check is coming in five minutes.
Why do I keep re-reading the same paragraph?
Usually because your eyes kept going while your attention left, which researchers call mindless reading. Rereading the paragraph a third time rarely helps. Mark it, write what you think it is trying to say, and move on. If it matters, it will resurface with context.
Does taking notes by hand actually help me focus more while reading?
Yes, and there is evidence. Mueller and Oppenheimer found handwritten notes beat typed ones for understanding, because writing is slow enough to force you to reword rather than copy. The rewording is the focus. Typing lets you transcribe while thinking about nothing.
How do I concentrate better while reading?
Read with a pen in hand and a question you want answered. Note one idea per page or chapter, and put your phone in another room. Active reading holds attention far better than passive scanning — Leonardo’s notebooks are full of notes on what he read.
Is reading before bed good for focus?
Reading a physical book before bed is a good wind-down for many people. For demanding study it is less ideal, because tired attention drifts. Save hard reading for when you are alert and keep bedtime reading light.
Sources
More on this: How to Focus Better
This is what I do here: take someone from history, find what is actually documented about how they worked, strip out the myth that has grown over it, and work out what transfers. More of them in the routines collection.
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